New Chief of CIA Espionage Is Named : Intelligence: Agency veteran David Cohen moves from analytical side to clandestine unit. Deutch says he has yet to decide on firings in Guatemala case.

CIA Director John M. Deutch filled one of the most politically sensitive posts in the U.S. intelligence community Monday, naming David Cohen, a 53-year-old career CIA official, to head the agency’s clandestine espionage arm.

Cohen’s appointment as the CIA’s deputy director of operations had been the source of widespread speculation within the intelligence community in recent days. It represents a modest break with tradition, since he has spent most of his career on the analytical, rather than the clandestine, side of the agency.

Cohen is a Boston native who joined the CIA in 1966. He put in a stint in clandestine operations earlier in his career but most recently has been serving as the CIA’s associate deputy director for the Directorate of Intelligence, which conducts analysis.

If Deutch had gone outside the agency to fill the post, the move would have been viewed as much more revolutionary.

Deutch also announced a series of other high-level appointments Monday, including the promotion of one of the few CIA officials to emerge from the Aldrich H. Ames spy scandal with his reputation enhanced. Paul Redmond, who as a senior official at the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center helped track down the Soviet mole inside the agency, was named to the post of associate deputy director for counterintelligence in the operations directorate.

In a press conference at the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters, Deutch also said that he has not yet decided whether any CIA officials should be fired as a result of the controversy over the agency’s role in Guatemala. A Guatemalan army officer who was a paid CIA informant has been linked to the murders of a U.S. citizen and the Guatemalan husband of an American woman.

Last week, the CIA’s inspector general issued a report on the matter that cleared agency personnel of any violation of laws and found that several key allegations against the CIA and its employees were unsubstantiated. And it determined that no CIA officials were involved in or condoned either of the two murders connected with the controversy.

But the report could not determine the extent of the involvement of the army officer to the killings--the 1990 murder of Michael DeVine, an innkeeper, or the 1992 torture-murder of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, husband of Jennifer Harbury.

And the report found that CIA officials failed to inform Congress of the agency’s ties to the Guatemalan officer for more than three years. Still, the investigation determined that the failure to notify Congress was inadvertent. It recommended that, while some punishments be imposed, no one should be fired.

Deutch acknowledged Monday that some key lawmakers in Congress are not convinced that the failure to notify them was inadvertent. He said that he will attempt to determine for himself whether any officials purposefully avoided telling Congress about the matter. Purposefully misleading Congress, Deutch said, would be grounds for immediate firing.

“I do not intend to let this matter lie there,” Deutch stressed. “I intend to get to the bottom of whether there was willful intent” to mislead or fail to notify Congress. “Failure to notify Congress is unacceptable.”

Deutch’s comments came amid mounting calls by congressional leaders for Deutch to impose stiff punishments on those responsible for the CIA’s mess in Guatemala.

In a related development, Harbury, the wife of the slain Guatemalan, filed suit in federal court here Monday against the CIA over its refusal to release information on the fate of her husband. She said that the CIA has failed to respond to her request for greater disclosure on her husband’s case under the Freedom of Information Act.

“I insist upon full and direct answers to my questions,” she said in a press statement Monday. “As a wife, I have every right to know what became of my husband. As a citizen, I have every right to know what the CIA has been doing in the name of the American people.”

Meanwhile, turnover in the management ranks at the CIA gave Deutch a chance to put his own people in almost every top position in the agency, and he moved to select leaders for all four of the main directorates Monday.

Besides Cohen, Deutch also said that John Gannon would take over as head of the intelligence directorate. With a Ph.D. in history, Gannon has been director of the CIA’s office of European analysis.

Deutch went outside the agency to fill the top spot at the CIA’s science and technology arm, naming Ruth David, director of advanced information technologies at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.

And he named Leo Hazlewood, formerly the CIA’s executive director, to be the deputy director for administration.